Frank Auerbach Catherine Lampert

FRANK AUERBACH Catherine Lampert FRANK AUERBACH Speaking and Painting With 100 illustrations, 78 in colour Contents Preface 6 1. Finding a Home in England 10 2. Forging a Reputation 54 3. ‘Painting is My Form of Action’ 84 Frontispiece: Head of Julia, 1981 4. First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by 118 Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181a High Holborn, London wc1v 7qx The Best Game Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting 5. © 2015 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London Text © 2015 Catherine Lampert Idiom and Subject 166 Works by Frank Auerbach © 2015 Frank Auerbach All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, Conclusion 206 including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-500-23925-4 Printed and bound in China by Toppan Leefung Printing Limited Notes 216 • Selected Bibliography 227 To find out about all our publications, please visit www.thamesandhudson.com Chronology 229 • List of Illustrations 231 There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print. Permissions 234 • Acknowledgments 235 • Index 236 Chapter One Finding a Home in England Berlin childhood Born on 29 April 1931, Frank Helmut Auerbach, an only child of older parents, recalls being coddled in a way that even at a young age felt suffocat- ing. This stemmed not only from the memory of being dressed in a blue velvet suit but also from the fact that his daily life was rather isolated from other children, with little freedom to play unwatched. The flat where he lived with his parents, Max Auerbach (b. 1890) and Charlotte Nora Borchardt Auerbach (b. 1902), was in a tall building with a large courtyard at 49 Güntzelstrasse in Wilmersdorf, a middle-class area of Berlin.1 A brass plate at the entrance announced his father’s name and credentials: he was a patent lawyer specializing in engineering and had his office at home. He had served in the army during the Great War and been awarded a medal of distinction. Pudgy and blond with glasses, Max Auerbach was descended from a long line of rabbis, including his father, Mannheim. Frank’s mother’s family, also Jewish, came from Lithuania; she was a dark-haired woman with a fine figure, although her jaw, like that of other Borchardts, protruded somewhat. Charlotte had studied art as a young woman and had been married before. The family lived in comfortable circumstances, milk and fresh rolls were delivered daily to the door. Frank’s parents seemed to get on, although his father was more relaxed and indulgent than his mother. ‘One of the few sort of tags of memories is of him buying a particular sort of bun for Frank drawing, Berlin, c. 1935 me and sitting opposite and seeming to take pleasure in the fact that I was 11 Frank with his mother, Charlotte, Berlin, c. 1931 Max Auerbach, the artist’s father, Berlin, c. 1932 Chapter One Finding a Home in England greedily eating it.’ Objects on his large desk, especially a blotter and paper Landschulheim Herrlingen, near Ulm in south Germany in 1926. The punch, amused his son. Other recollections are telling, such as the gift of a teaching was informed by Essinger’s studies at American universities, and paint-box. ‘I remember vividly putting a wet brush for the first time onto a especially by her identification with Quaker principles. She embraced the cake of watercolour and I think one of my tricks, like you get a dog to roll educational philosophy known as Reformpädagogik whereby pupils and staff over, was that I did little drawings, and in my case they were of Red Indians were considered equal and everyone was responsible for the common good on scooters, which I was asked to draw. I can’t have been more than three of the school.5 By 1933, the pupils in Ulm were exclusively Jewish and, con- or four.’ 2 Among his books, Kai aus der Kiste (1926) by Wolf Durian was a cerned about the Nazi threat, Essinger transferred the school to England. favourite. It was ‘about a German boy who stowed away, in a wooden box, She rented, and later bought, a Georgian house, Bunce Court, near the for America. He had a great success in the States by devising ever more village of Lenham and not far from the town of Faversham in the North amazing advertising stunts.’ 3 In conversation, memories still occasionally Downs of Kent, where existing and new students were offered places. surface, as when I described going to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in Unsurprisingly, the demand from Jewish families rapidly escalated as the 2013 to watch Kraftwerk perform. Mentioning their nostalgic song of 1974, Nazis’ racial laws tightened. Origo arranged with Essinger to sponsor six ‘Autobahn’, Auerbach commented that when one of the first sections of children to attend Bunce Court; those selected included Dr Altenberg’s the Berlin ring road opened in 1936, taking a drive was a popular diversion. nephew and niece, as well as Frank. The family stopped at the observatory just off the motorway, and the five- Auerbach’s parents had hoped the persecution of Jews would get no year-old impressed the grown-ups by coming out with the word ‘meteor’. worse, but facing the reality of the situation, they had acceded to Dr The rise of the Nazi party and the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Altenberg’s plan. Shortly before Frank’s eighth birthday they took him chancellor in January 1933 were a cause of anxiety and, already nervous to Hamburg, where on 4 April 1939 he boarded the SS Washington in the by nature, Frank’s mother was fearful of the mounting anti-Semitism. On company of three people he had never met before: the Altenberg children, one occasion, when the nanny took Frank to the park, he was given a sweet Heinz and Ilse, and their nanny. The four shared a second-class cabin. This in the street and, hearing of this and alarmed that someone had been trying temporary home offered a rather special playroom on their deck with a to poison her son, his mother put him to bed so she could watch for tell-tale rocking horse; Frank remembers this and the stale odour on the ship. When signs. As time went on, the restrictions on Jews increased, particularly after it docked first at Le Havre, he saw, with horror, carcasses of meat covered the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 that defined who was in black flies hanging in the butchers’ shops. Arriving in Southampton, the Jewish, and when the licences of Jewish lawyers were revoked, the plate at group boarded a train to London and were met at Victoria station by the entrance had to be changed to ‘Max Auerbach, Engineering Graduate’. someone from Bunce Court, who took the children down to Kent; the Uncle Jakob, his father’s older brother, was also a lawyer. His partner, nanny returned to Germany. Frank’s suitcase contained his clothes and on Dr Altenberg, retired to Italy in 1938. There he met the wealthy Anglo- the larger garments his mother had stitched a red cross to indicate they American writer Iris Origo, who was to provide a lifeline for Frank. Iris, who were for later use; on items such as tablecloths and sheets intended for when had grown up in Fiesole, had married a minor Italian aristocrat, Antonio he was grown up, two red crosses had been sewn in a corner. Origo, in 1924 and the couple then devoted their lives to improving the poverty-stricken estate of La Foce that they bought in the Val d’Orcia in Bunce Court southeast Tuscany. Origo had started a school for the children of local The atmosphere at Bunce Court was unlike anything Frank had encoun- peasants, most of whom were illiterate.4 This led her to correspond with tered in his previous life, yet instead of feeling abandoned he felt curiously Anna Essinger, a German Jewish educator who had opened her own school, at home, in the sense of liberated. Frank remembers being locked in a shed 14 15 Chapter One by two boys on his first afternoon, yet the experience ‘somehow didn’t depress me’. Later he got into a fight with another boy, and turned to a bystander to say, ‘I think I might get on a bit better if you cheered for me.’ His supporter, Michael Roemer, three years older, became a friend and the two are still close. In the nine months from December 1938 to when the war started in September 1939 a number of the other pupils at the school arrived in Britain unaccompanied on the Kindertransport organized by the Refugee Children’s Movement and World Jewish Relief. 6 The student body was not exclusively Jewish, however. Bunce Court advertised in the New Statesman and other left-wing papers, and English couples, perhaps going through a divorce and finding it awkward to look after their children, might send them there. Bruce Bernard, later a friend and a remarkable photo editor, together with his brother Jeffrey, a famous journalist, attended the school in 1936–37. The staff, who were all devoted to the students, consisted mostly of refugees. Joined by British conscientious objectors once war broke out, they ranged from the unqualified to the overqualified.

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